


mothers and protectors

by availedobscurity



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Dreams, M/M, i'll add tags & characters as i post chapters & they become relevant, pre-murderous mask? au lite? idk, vaguely inspired by the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 21:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16072073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/availedobscurity/pseuds/availedobscurity
Summary: Juno Steel has been having strange dreams.





	mothers and protectors

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to longfic 2: back in the habit, if you have not read the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater prior to this fic, you should do that before or even instead of this!
> 
> also: i know my last longfic updated very quickly, usually. this will... not do that. anyway enjoy

Juno Steel was good at avoiding sleep, in the same way that boats were good at staying afloat. The alternative would have seen him lost before he could even begin surviving. His exhaustion was ever-present and hollow, but if he was really trying, he could count on sleep not to come.

When he wanted to hedge his bets, he drank liquor and caffeine in equal quantities until he saw the sunrise. He fell into his bed without bothering to get undressed, and he filled his head with regrets and lingering questions and unresolved guilt that spiraled him away from anywhere he felt safe closing his eyes. He stared listlessly past his broken blinds at the neon lights glowing outside until he tricked his brain into awakeness, and he focused on the next thing, the next thing, the next thing while he lay limp and useless, leaking drowsy thoughts everywhere.

It would have been easy if sleeping were the problem. Sleep didn’t want Juno Steel. It spat him out as soon as it realized what it had taken a bite out of.

Dreaming was a different thing altogether. Dreams took him by the lapels and shook his lucidity off of him, and they held him so tightly that their knuckles went ashen. He blinked once, and he was awake, and alone, and he blinked again to find he was neither. One second, safe enough. In control. And then he wasn’t.

Her hair was long and loose and wild, the bleached memory of colored paper left out in the sun for too long. Her eyes were the pale yellow light that crept around the edges of a shuttered window.

When she put her hand on his face it felt like worn, gelatinized sandpaper wrapped around foam.

Juno Steel knew what dreams felt like. When he was awake he could feel them, brushing his hands and arms and begging them to see him. When he was asleep they felt real. They had always felt real.

 _Pretty little Juno Steel._ He felt a wave of recognition when he heard her not-quite-voice. For just a moment, he felt a pull from somewhere latent in him, buried-deep and boarded-over, but it passed and left him with nothing but the feeling of scrapes on his knees and a smell like dust. 

She was gauze floating in the tide. In this gray nothing, she was the absence of the color gold. and the sound of the pause between breathing in and breathing out.

 _You’ve lost all of it again,_ she informed him, perched on the edge of nothing. She was diffuse and blurred, and trying to focus on any single feature of her made his eyes cross. _You have to start all the way from the beginning, and you have no way to find the pieces you need. You’ve thrown too many away. But you will know. A steady spreading drip of blood. A body’s sudden stillness, and feet resolute before it. You will know._ She held out her hand, and a glass vial appeared in it, so much more defined than she was. He exhaled, and he could swear he saw a trickling of white-gray fog appeared inside of the oddly-shaped vessel.

If she was trying to give him a portent, or a threat, it wasn’t working. There was always blood. There were always knives, blasters, poisons, blunt objects swung at full force that he couldn’t put himself in front of fast enough to save anyone. He exhaled again. There was another coil of smoke in the vial, and this time he saw it leave his mouth.

“Nice seeing you, too,” Juno said. “Love what you’ve done with the... place?” He raised his arms to the blankness around them, wondering at his own familiarity. It felt like performing a script he couldn’t remember having memorized.

 _This is not a place. This is everything I have left to forfeit._ Endlessly long hair reached towards him, grasping and surrounding him, slowly eclipsing the dim light. His feet were attached to the ground beneath them.

It was a dream. He was dreaming. But he didn’t think it was his dream.

The space between them stretched so she was left reaching, always reaching, moving closer but never quite getting ahold of him. He knew she would reach him if he stayed long enough, and he knew it would end everything if she touched him for even a second. He wanted to wake up alone and choking on his own breath, rather than watching the inevitable take too long to break him.

“Stay away from me,” Juno warned, an empty threat made of fear and helplessness.

 _You did this to me, Juno Steel,_ she said. _You may have forgotten, but you did this._

“I don’t even know you, lady,” Juno said, but they both knew he was lying.

The glass vessel was halfway full now, and she looked at it with consideration, giving it a swirl.

_You knew. Everything. Everything, all of it, everything, everything--_

Listening to her while the space between them accelerated was starting to make him nauseous. “Yeah, okay, I get the picture. What do you want from me?”

For a second he saw teeth, sharp and violent, and then they disappeared. _I want your heart, Juno Steel._

 _Oh, is that all?_ Juno asked. The vial was almost full.

She laughed. _That is neither the beginning nor end,_ she near-said. _You have so much that is mine by right. I will have it back, in the end of things, and you will accept it fully._ The empty space pulsed like a thing alive, and wrapped around his ankles, and she smiled. _But now, Juno, you are going to--_ **wake up.**

The vial in her hand traveled a perfect arc, freeing itself from her grip when her arm was pointed perfect and straight towards him, and Juno Steel’s eyes startled open to the impact of glass on the wall behind him, shards falling onto him where he shot to a sitting position, his lungs suddenly full to bursting.

He expelled something white and chalky from the depths of his chest, and it dissolved into the still air of his bedroom.

 

Peter Nureyev awoke to the sound of shattering, and a gasping, coughing, panicked yell, filtered through static. He had been settled in for a short doze, back and head against a negligent stranger’s desk and legs overlapping at the ankles, but it seemed that his sleep would be cut short for the night.

He gave his back a quick roll and stretched his arms and legs, ridding himself of their stiffness. He got to his feet in one fluid motion and shoved Peter Nureyev deep under his diaphragm, where he belonged. _You are Rex Glass, and you are not what you seem,_ he reminded himself quickly. _The detective thinks you are hiding something; he should catch on shortly._ He stood, navigating a dark room owned by a hapless night-shift tenant with a laughable front door lock. _And if he doesn’t, you can inform him yourself soon enough._

It would all be so much more convenient if he could just hurry up and start spending the night in the detective’s apartment, but he did have his process to consider. Still, being able to surveill the detective and sleep in a bed simultaneously was the ideal, and he intended to reach it as soon as was reasonable to do so. Too soon would disrupt his current plan, but he had an ache in his back and a knack for improvisation, so he chose to keep his options open.

Peter Nureyev became Rex Glass, concerned and knowing too much for his own good, and took silent steps down the dim-lit hallway until he was in front of Juno Steel’s door. _Look tired,_ he reminded himself, and rapped his knuckles in the door twice, shaking his head so his hair became slightly mussed.

“Juno?” he asked, trying to peer in through the keyhole. “Are you all right?”

No answer. He hadn’t expected one. No matter. Rex Glass had only a loose concept of boundaries.

“I’m coming in, Juno,” he said, careful to keep his tone concerned and confused as he opened the door to Juno Steel’s apartment. It was as messy as he had last left it, if not more. The door to Juno’s bedroom was open, and Rex Glass was at the threshold in no time at all.

“Get out of my apartment, Rex,” Juno said, strained and hushed. One could only be so loud in the dark.

“Are you all right?” Rex Glass repeated as though he hadn’t heard Juno’s request. “I heard someone yelling.” He leaned into the doorway of Juno Steel’s bedroom.

The detective was sitting, small and defensive, in a bed full of broken glass, clutching his slowly bleeding palm. “What are you doing here?”

“Your apartment was ransacked,” he said, with perfectly slightly-too-rehearsed worry, the kind that sounded like an excuse.

“It wasn’t _that_ ransacked, I just live like this.” Peter Nureyev knew that to be true, having done the ransacking himself. It was always an interesting challenge to use someone’s own traits against them. The detective wiped his palm against his shirt, soaking up the blood to better study his injury. He hadn’t even gotten undressed before crawling into bed. Peter Nureyev had some surprising feelings about that, but he didn’t have the time to categorize them. The detective coughed, bowed over like he was ill. “Go back to your own place. How did you even get in here?”

“You left the door unlocked,” Peter lied, and wondered at Juno’s belief that he had a place to go back to. Everyone always believed that about him so easily. It still surprised him, that they never questioned whether the man they were talking to had a somewhere to go back to.

People like him had homes. They had _pasts_. That was a given. 

Rex Glass had a home. Rex Glass certainly appeared to have an apartment to live in. He was a known resident of Mars in all the ways that mattered (namely, on paper and in data), but when Juno Steel had asked what apartment his newly-introduced neighbor lived in, he had elected to gesture vaguely down the hallway and immediately change the subject, and it had never been a question after that. 

Because Rex Glass had a history, and a family long dead, and a vested interest in the supernatural. Rex Glass had only ever been himself, even if he was a liar, too. He had a cause, and a sense of sentimentality, and no grasp on boundaries. When faced with a situation in which a caustic, closed-off, compellingly romantic neighbor might be in danger, he was the type to nobly insist on making sure the aforementioned was safe no matter what. All he had to do was amicably misinterpret every suggestion that he leave Juno Steel alone, break the lock on his door every time he locked it, and act just suspicious enough to be dangerous if unsupervised. 

It was a straightforward enough balance. It was as easy as keeping Peter Nureyev’s and Rex Glass’s secrets separate, and Peter Nureyev’s secrets were tucked so deeply into himself that he forgot how much they had made of him.

“Just go home,” Juno said again, a little more afraid than aggressive. Rex Glass seized onto the fear of something-else like a vulture did a scrap of meat.

“And leave you to face the big, bad wolves alone when they decide to reappear?” he asked, making a mental note to empty a few drawers onto the floor next time Juno Steel was out. “A lady like you shouldn’t be left alone at a time like this.” Juno’s shoulders rose in a defensive barrier while he scoffed, returning to thorough examination of his own palm. The bleeding hadn’t stemmed, and Peter Nureyev noted his wince of disgust he thrust the cut into his mouth. With his free hand, he wrapped the sheet he was sitting on top of around the shards of glass surrounding him and dropped the improvised parcel onto the floor.

“A lady like me, huh?,” he asked, words muffled by the meat of his hand. He released his palm from his mouth and gave his head a small shake. Another shard of glass fell from his head to the floor. “You know a lot of ladies like me?”

“Not nearly enough,” he said without a second’s hesitation, and the detective made a sound that could have been annoyed, or flustered, or, if Rex Glass was successful in his pursuits, both.

“It’s too early in the morning for this, Rex,” the detective said, ignoring his gaze. He began to rub his eyes, but cringed along with the flex of his fingers.

“Does that hurt?” Peter asked, moving briskly towards the detective moored in the center of his bed.

“It’s fine,” Juno said, but Rex had already grabbed Juno’s hand in his own without an invitation. “Or just take a look anyway, I guess, not like I get a say when it’s my own damn hand. And my own apartment--”

“Sh,” Rex said, bringing Juno’s hand closer to his face to assess the cut’s depth, letting his palm brush against the pulse in the detective’s wrist. The cut was shallow. The pulse was fast. “Must you complain about every little thing?” he asked as he flicked on Juno’s side table light, and Juno cringed away from the brightness as the glass remaining in his bed and on the floor was illuminated. In the light, he could see small cuts the width of a spider’s thread on his face. New, but already well on their way to healing over.

“Yes,” Juno said, but he didn’t pull away, only avoided his gaze. Peter Nureyev swallowed a smile, and held the detective’s hand longer than he had to, feeling the edge of a pulse quickening before he released it all at once and took long strides to the bathroom.

“Nothing some disinfectant and a bandage won’t fix,” he said, cheerful enough to disarm as he took the liberty of opening the detective’s medicine cabinet. “What happened?” He had a theory, but it wouldn’t do for Juno to know it.

“Don’t go through my cabinets!”

Peter Nureyev couldn’t help but let out one stifled laugh at that, quickly turned into a cough. He had already near-memorized the contents of the detective’s medicine cabinets, almost certainly better than the detective himself had judging by the expiration dates. He had the required materials in hand and the cabinet door shut safely behind him before Juno had finished the sentence. “Already done!” he said cheerfully. “Don’t get up, Juno, you wouldn’t want to injure yourself more than you already have.” He seated himself at the detective’s feet on a mostly-glass-free section of his bed before he could protest, and took his hand back in the same motion. “I’m not one to judge you your choice of bedside companion, but I’ve never seen anyone take a bottle to his bed so literally. It seems you both had something of a rough night-”

“It wasn’t broken when it got here,” Juno grumbled, and Peter couldn’t help but smirk at that, pushing the feeling to an untouched room in his chest while he saturated a swab with disinfectant. “Must have been sleepwalking,” Juno said, looking away. “I do that sometimes.”

It was a plausible answer. He hadn’t known Juno Steel long, and the detective wasn’t exactly predictable, but he had patterns. Everyone did. A sarcastic denial would have meant Rex Glass was wrong. A plausible excuse, on the other hand, all but confirmed his suspicions.

He nodded as though he had not moved bounds closer to an answer in one sentence alone. “A violent sleeper, then. Side effects of a busy mind?” He took Juno’s hand back for the third time and dabbed the swab against the still-bleeding cut and watched it clot instantly while Juno hissed his pain.

“Guess you could say that,” Juno said with gritted teeth.

Rex Glass placed the swab on Juno’s bedside table and ran his free hand down Juno’s arm, then back up, leaning too close towards him. “I can tell. You’re very tense.”

The detective looked at the path of Rex’s hand, for a moment spellbound, then shook it off. “Maybe I’d be less tense if someone didn’t just show up in my apartment--”

“Yes, I have heard that a home invasion can do that. Make you feel like you’re never alone, and all of the related unease. But Juno, so long as I’m here you have nothing to worry about from thieves and criminals.” Rex Glass was lying, but in a very different way than Peter Nureyev was.

“I wasn’t worried,” Juno said under his breath. “Comes with the job.”

“Does this happen often, then?”

”I investigate people for a living. Some of them want to investigate back.” Rex resumed bandaging Juno’s cut. It wasn’t deep enough to warrant it, but he needed to be trusted, and this was by far the closest the detective had gotten to sharing detailed personal information. “Hasn’t made me as many enemies as the PD, but that’s only because my name doesn’t spread around as fast anymore.”

“Enemies? You?” Rex asked with a jab of feigned shock.

“No, I’m forging deep and profound relationships with the people I put in handcuffs,” Juno said drily. “You really learn a lot about a person while you wait for the police cruiser to find parking.”

Rex pretended to measure his words carefully. “No, I only meant… it must be lonely for you.” He paused in his work. “No one’s visited to help you clean up, I noticed. No family? Friends? Partners?”

“It’s been one day, Rex,” he said, as if that was supposed to have some kind of meaning. Still, even if the words didn’t tell him anything, there were more ways to tell than by speaking. Having a reliable support system showed on a person, and the slump in Juno Steel’s shoulders said that if he had one, he wasn’t using it. “Besides, I’ve been dealing with stuff like this since I was a kid.” He saw Rex’s curious glance. “Ma stopped being the nurturing type pretty quick.”

Oh, good. He raced towards segues, following likely questions and answers. “That sounds difficult,” he said, because he had heard someone else say that before, and because… well. It was difficult, but saying anything more could imply empathy, and empathy was a giveaway. Sympathy, fine. Most anyone with more heart than ambition could sympathize if they put their mind to it. Empathy, though, was as good as showing people your hand, and every hand you were dealt before it. “So you raised yourself. Alone?”

Juno paused.

“I had a brother for a little while. But… like I said. She stopped being the nurturing type quick.” 

Rex Glass filled in the very few blanks he had. Anything that had belonged to Sarah Steel would have last passed through the stewardship of Juno Steel, and he had significant evidence to believe that his particular interest ended there.

Juno went on, almost to himself. “He’s never going to be older than I am. And that’s not fair, right?”

“Most things aren’t,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Juno said, and coughed again. “Guess you’re right.”

He met his answer with silence and finished with Juno’s hand. The layer of bandage was thicker than was strictly necessary, but he was here to make Juno Steel trust him, not to pass a medical exam. 

“This should hold,” Rex said. “Be a bit more careful with your sleepwalking next time, detective. I won’t always be in the next room to play doctor for you.”

“Good,” Juno said. “This is my apartment.”

“It’s not an inconvenience in the least,” Rex reassured him.

“For you,” Juno murmured.

“What can I say? I have a soft spot for striking detectives.” He traced a small circle in Juno’s palm with his thumb, calculated in its thoughtlessness. “It’s a romantic line of work. The excitement, the intrigue, the endless thirst for creating justice in a world that won’t provide it for you,” he continued.

“I didn’t spend the last thirty years wanting to be a detective because it’s romantic,” Juno said.

“Fine,” Peter sighed before he could stop himself, “Sexy, then.”

Were Juno Steel’s face in that moment immortalized in art, Peter Nureyev would have ripped the canvas from its frame and absconded at the first heartbeat after the curator left the room. He sputtered out “that’s-not”s and “you-don’t” for a bit, before finally settling on, _”’Sexy’?”_

Peter decided to show mercy. Or, something like it, anyway.

“What can I say? I’m weak for a lady out of uniform.” He faked innocence as he almost thoughtlessly rested a hand on Juno’s thigh so he could lean in closer and give Juno’s collar a tug. 

“Oh. _Oh,”_ Juno said, as though he was only just considering the full range of reasons why a man might be so dedicated to ensuring his safety. Peter Nureyev liked to move fast. It made everyone else want to catch up faster than they could ask themselves why they were running.

Juno’s eyes traveled from hand to arm to shoulder to neck to finally meet Peter Nureyev’s eyes.

Except they were not Peter Nureyev’s eyes. It was Rex Glass who wanted to know what Juno Steel would do if right now he leaned in and let their lips meet, and that impulse didn’t worry Peter Nureyev in the least, because it did not belong to him. This was, for Peter Nureyev, transactional. He had a job that would be much easier to complete if Juno Steel wanted him there, and this was the most efficient way to make Juno want him there. Anything beyond practicality must have been a whim or a quirk of Rex Glass’s, because Peter Nureyev was not going to continue being charmed by anyone who could do what he couldn’t, and commit himself to something despite any consequences that may come.

It was a practical choice, really, to bridge that gap and see if Juno Steel would let his walls down. It was only utility.

Peter Nureyev looked at his hand as though he had only just noticed where it had landed. From there it was a practiced path: look at his eyes. Look at his mouth. Be seen looking at his mouth. Make it obvious.

Juno looked away, and Peter Nureyev resigned himself to sleeping with a wall at his back and a speaker in his ear for the foreseeable future.

 

Rita woke up on time to be only a little late for work. And she would have only been a little late, except when she woke up she usually stayed in bed for a minute or two, and while she was there she realized that the show she and Franny were watching was heading towards an arc that would probably lead to one of those series-of-increasing-misunderstandings plots that Rita loved and hated and she knew _exactly_ how it was going to happen, probably, and she needed to tell Franny immediately, and one second she had an hour and then it was five minutes before she had to be in the office and she still hadn’t gotten her legs out from under the covers.

She ran through her morning routine as quickly as she could, and put on her shoes while she stepped out the door. There wasn’t any reason to--if Rita’s default setting was a little late, her boss’s default setting was _very_ late. Or overnight-in-the-office, never-leaving-on-time, but usually that meant Mr. Steel was too distracted to know what time it was anyway.

This morning, it was the latter. Mr. Steel was in the office and awake and _at his desk_ when Rita got in for the morning, and that wasn’t normal at all. Her boss stared at his comms like she did when she was waiting for Frannie to get caught up on whatever show they were watching. 

Rita took a breath, and prepared herself to be sneaky. She opened the door just wide enough to slip through, knocking into the coat rack as she slid through, and immediately abandoned sneakiness as a concept in favor of sheer speed and audacity. She threw her coat on top of the spitefully loud coat rack and herself into her chair in the same movement, letting the door close behind her while she picked up her mug and pretended to drink from it.

She looked over her desk. No messages.

“Rita!” He startled when he saw her, and his comms jumped out of his hands. He rushed to catch it before it hit the floor, and succeeded only in almost-catching it enough times that by the time it hit the ground it felt like she was watching in slow motion. He grabbed the thing off the ground, then straightened up weirdly fast and tried to smooth himself back to authority. “You’re here early.”

Rita double-checked the time. She was half an hour late.

“Just wanted to open up the office for the day,” Rita said. It was dishonest, but this was her job, and she was a responsible employee usually. She’d just come in early some other time, someday.

More important than her chronic secret lateness was that Mr. Steel was taking a call, on purpose. Or maybe making one. Either way, she had known Mr. Steel long enough to know that if he was making calls, that meant something real bad was going on.

“Who’re you talking to?” Rita asked, leaning so far forward at her desk that she sprawled across it.

“Nothing. No one. It’s none of your business,” Juno blurted.

Yep, definitely something bad. “You hired me to make your phone calls for you, is all,” Rita said.

“Then maybe you should do that instead of asking annoying personal questions,” Juno said, looking away from her. He took a couple of steps forward, flexing his hands like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Mr. Steel, what’s that on your hand?” Rita asked, because Mr. Steel never really meant that he didn’t want her to ask him questions. She thought. It was hard to be sure, but he told her things sometimes. It never seemed like he meant to, or wanted to, but he did. She liked that. It made her feel like she might be important to him.

“Oh. Cut myself.” Mr. Steel revealed a bandage on his hand with a small dismissive wave, and that was the second suspicious thing. Rita knew for a fact that he would never do that a good a job taking care of one of his own cuts. Someone else’s, maybe; a client had accidentally slammed the door into her once and left her with a bloody nose and a cut over her brow, and Mr. Steel had fixed her right up, after he decked the client for yelling at her for getting in the way.

They hadn’t gotten paid for that case, but Rita did manage to use the client’s browser to mine some bitcoin afterwards, so if the exchange rate ever rose again that was going to pay off big time.

Which was to say, Mr. Steel wouldn’t have taken such good care of himself. It looked more like what he would do for someone he cared about.

“Who fixed you up?” she asked, not expecting much of an answer. It was always worth a try, and she liked keeping tabs on Mr. Steel’s friends when she could.

“Oh. Just a… guy.”

A dot-dot-dot ‘guy’ was the most romantic type of guy possible. For Mr. Steel, anyway. For Rita it was more of a blushing, smiling, couldn’t-feel-her-legs ‘whattaguy’, but that didn’t make Mr. Steel any less valid. “What kind of guy?”

“Uh. Tall?”

Rita nodded seriously, setting her jaw. A one-word adjectival description with a voice crack. Mr Steel only saved those for things he had too many emotions about, like sad movies and when she got him something nice. “Mmhm,” she squeaked. “Tall.” Rita nodded again. She couldn’t speak too quickly, or else she’d scare Mr. Steel off. He already had that look, like he wanted to talk but didn’t want anyone to listen, and this was one time when she didn’t want to see her boss with his mouth shut.

Juno looked at her with concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” Rita said, as suavely as possible. “Just wondering when you got a chance to meet a tall gentleman, considering that you left the office last night and it was already night hours, and now it’s only morning hours, which means you must’ve met a tall gentlemen during the night hours, not to say that that implies anything but it implies a few things, Mr. Steel, there are some implications there that you could find if you really thought about it, so I was wondering if maybe,” she was talking too fast, and Mr. Steel was starting to get that look. She took a breath, and calmly sat back against her chair, straightening her back and folding her hands. “Was this a social visit, Mr. Steel?”

“Not… really?” Juno said. “He was…” he clenched his teeth, “checking on me, I guess.” His mouth was a steep and uncomfortable slope. “Keeps waltzing into my apartment, expecting me to… I don’t know.”

Rita nodded, her fist gripping her letter opener in her fist like a weapon. “Do I have to give somebody a talk, Mr. Steel?”

“What?” Juno asked.

“You heard me.” Rita started up her computer with her free hand, feeling the corners of her improvised weapon digging into her palm. The screen lit up, and she passed through all her regular encryption one-handed until she landed at her usual background-check chain. “If you’re not going to make him respect your boundaries _I will.”_

“It’s not like that, Rita.” He didn’t sound much like he believed what he was saying, and he definitely didn’t expect Rita to believe it either. “Someone broke in to my apartment a couple of days ago and he--”

“You got robbed?”

“I didn’t get _robbed,_ I got a little broken into but--” Mr. Steel caught on to her rapidly typing fingers. “ It’s nothing, Rita,” her boss warned. 

She was already pulling up Mr. Steel’s apartment security feeds, searching for suspicious activity, or at least a glimpse of his latest caller so she could pass her judgment. Mr. Steel wasn’t usually so loose-lipped about his personal life, so if he was going to drop some details about a tall gentleman with medical prowess she would waste no time pursuing them. She ignored Mr. Steel’s protests, and instead tilted the screen towards him.

“I didn’t even know we had security cameras,” Juno said.

“Just in the elevator.”

Mr. Steel became very still, and his brows made a straight line featuring perpendicular wrinkles of concern as though he was remembering something. “You don’t usually look at that, right?”

Rita stopped looking at the screen and looked at her boss with concern. “Should I be worried about what I’m gonna see here, boss?’ She readied herself to be disgusted.

“Let’s just focus on the break-in,” Mr Steel suggested, and Rita nodded, except now she was curious, in that self-sabotaging way curiosity had for her. “Two days ago, between eleven and eight.”

She went to the appointed time. A man entered the elevator. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was at least taller than Mr. Steel. “You know him?” Rita asked.

“No.” Mr. Steel shook his head. “We’re not doing this.”

“I’m just trying to find suspects, Mr. Steel!” She zoomed in. The man looked fine, she supposed. Mostly bland. Mr. Steel could do better, and had done better, judging by the last woman she had managed to catch him with, and the person before that. For someone who purportedly didn’t like Rita to know about his personal life, Mr. Steel was very bad at hiding the facts of his personal life from her.

Rita watched the disappointingly normal man get off the elevator, two floors before Mr. Steel’s. “Hey, boss,” Rita aimed for subtlety, “What floor’d you say your gentleman friend lived on again?”

“I don’t have a gentleman friend, Rita,” Mr. Steel said, and Rita hummed skeptically.

Another man got on the elevator. “Who’s that?” she inquired, innocent, and Mr. Steel said nothing.

At 3:00pm, the screen went blank except for the time stamp in the corner. Rita dialed the time back, and the same thing happened again. She tried to reconstruct an image, and then she tried to pull the original feed.

“Is it… off?” Mr. Steel gave the computer monitor a nudge, as though that could fix something, and Rita shoved his arm away.

“No, it’s not off, Mr. Steel. There’s nothing there,” Rita said. “It just cuts out, probably for whoever got in your apartment, and I didn’t even get to see a single tall man anywhere!”

“Ha!” Mr. Steel cried out, triumphant.

“But now I can’t see who broke in either,” Rita pointed out, typing wildly. There was nothing. The next hour just… didn’t exist.

“Oh.” Juno paused. “You can’t just…” He mimed typing, but in his way. His fingers weren’t even on the home keys when the home keys were fake.

“No, Mr. Steel, I can’t recover footage that was never there.” Rita said it as clearly as she could, reminded of explaining to an especially dense pet sitter the best way to feed her fish without getting a bite to the hand.

Mr. Steel looked disappointed for a second, then shrugged, mostly unbothered. “I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. It’s just a break-in, I’ve done hundreds of them.”

“Shouldn’t you be worried? You live there.” Rita considered the offer she was about to make, and pushed forward with it, even though every word was a splinter. “You can stay at my place until - “

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh, that’s a relief, I was just offering because it seemed like the polite thing to do and I would have, Mr. Steel, but I know what this office gets like when you stay here a while and I don’t want that to happen to the place where I live, boss, no offense but - “

“Didn’t need the details, Rita.” Mr. Steel put his hands in his pockets and turned around. “I can take care of it. I’m going to look into a few things in my office. Let me know if we get any real cases, will you?”

“I think you being robbed is still a real case.”

“Can’t pay myself, Rita,” he said, and retreated to his office. She was still trying to think of some convincing rebuttal when the door clicked shut.

He was probably right. Rita sighed and put on a pot of coffee, waiting for it to brew before she settled down with a direct feed to Mr. Steel’s apartment building’s security feed in one monitor and a stream she was catching up on in the other. She was going to try to capture a glimpse of her boss’s gentleman friend, even if it meant watching every second of the very dull, possibly-horrifying elevator feed. She wouldn’t be able to call herself a good secretary if she didn’t.

 

Juno Steel was burning in the exact shape of Rex Glass’s hands when he closed his eyes and found himself somewhere else again.

He knew he hadn’t fallen asleep. This wasn’t sleeping. This shouldn’t have been happening, but it was, and he was nose to nose with her, staring directly into her fog-covered eyes.

_Your heart, Juno._

Juno jumped, and tried not to shout. His eyes snapped open.

He was in his office this time. 

Juno swallowed, and stared straight ahead.

It had never been like this before.

His hand went to his comms again, but he didn’t pick it up, only felt the shape of it with his hand. He knew he wasn’t going to call. It wouldn’t help, anyway, just get the two of them caught up in this mess instead of just the one.

He closed his eyes and held his face in his hands, blocking all the light from outside. He needed to sleep. He needed not to sleep. Or, to sleep without dreaming. Like that was going to happen. If something wanted him they’d pull him in, and something really wanted him. Wanted his… heart? The details were fuzzy, and he’d lost almost all of them when he woke up, only remembered the sudden glee in her when she flung a bottle at him, like seeing Juno bleed was the only thing she wanted.

The bottle. The glass. Rex saw it. Rex saw it, and he accepted it too fast. Juno felt his hands on his arm and his hand and his thigh all over again, and shivered. He hadn’t asked enough questions. Not about the break-in, not about the glass, only about--him.

Juno held his eyes wide open, staring at his desk without taking anything in.

Rex Glass always looked like he was laughing at his own private joke with himself. Most everyone worth worrying about in Hyperion City was a weapon. They were rusty nails astray on the ground and lengths of pipe held aloft and long twists of wire wrapped tight around fingers. The man lounging in the doorway of his apartment was no one’s weapon. He was a predator, and Juno didn’t know what he was hunting.

Or maybe he was just being paranoid. Wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe it was having his eyes open and seeing a beautiful, dangerous stranger, and then closing them and feeling a set of fingernails in his flesh, telling him to _give me your heart,_ that made him afraid to look at Rex Glass ever again.

 _It’s nothing. You’re tired. It’s nothing,_ Juno said, and then he forgot himself and blinked.

It was a mistake.

“What do you want from me?” Juno asked, wishing he could lay down in his own dream and sleep there, but he was locked into standing. Every time he tried to move the space around him moved, the world’s orientation anchored to the balls of his feet.

 _Not you,_ she laughed. _Why must you always make it about you, little Juno Steel, when there is so much more in this world, and when every corner of it that cares about you is one you built yourself?_

“What do you want?” he asked.

 _Your hands._ She stared at him, unblinking. Too close. He could see her eyes now, and they were the yellow of aged bone. _What’s left of them._

“What do you mean?” He brandished his hands in her direction. The right wasn’t bandaged here, and blood dripped freely down his arm, but otherwise they were in good enough shape. He wiggled his fingers at her, sarcastic and almost taunting. “The gang’s all here.”

 _You’ve already given them away in bits and pieces, Juno. They have done so many things you would never have asked them to do yourself, haven’t they?_ She smiled, and Juno saw every joint in his hands attached to puppet strings that stretched interminably above. _You would have done worse on your own, of course, but instead you signed them to people who would use you to kill._

“They’re still mine.” Juno’s hands were shaking, and he didn’t know if it was him or the strings. “I’m still the one who pulled the trigger. Or didn’t. It’s still-”

 _And they always hurt, don’t they?_ She put a finger to Juno’s lips, and his mouth sealed shut. _Every clenching fist feels like snapping twigs. Your fingers are always cold. Your veins don’t want to send anything there anymore. A wave of your hands is the sound of a door creaking open on rusted hinges. The two of them only serve you a reminder that your body is going to fail you someday, and soon. Aren’t you better off if they belong to someone else?_

Juno’s mouth didn’t unseal, but she still heard him.

_You can still use them. They just won’t be yours._

He said nothing.

_We have a mutual friend, I think, you and I. We know someone who deserves them._

Juno pulled against the fishing wire on his fingers, as though he could shake the things holding him down from where they hid.

 _No, sweet Juno Steel, not yet,_ she said, and she wrapped both of her hands around his. He tried to pull away, but he couldn’t do that, either. _Please. Don’t be difficult. We will be here a very long time if you decide to be difficult, and I can wait much longer than you can._

Juno felt himself turning to stone, a translucent jade-colored marble spreading from his knees outwards.

 _Oh, don’t be like that. It’s a terrible metaphor._ She didn’t let go of his hands, but she brushed his face. _Please, Juno. I’ll tell you what it’s for if you promise to wake up before you can remember._

The wires disappeared, and he couldn’t feel his hands.

Light crept in through the gap between his eyelids, telling him that no matter what time he had been aiming to wake for, he had overslept. The side of his face felt pleasantly cold and numb where it had been pressed against his desk for however long he had been asleep for. He slitted his eyes open, fighting their natural drift back to shut.

His office. He heard Rita typing, and the muted sounds of one of those badly written soaps she liked, and her gasps along with certain lines and twists.

He didn’t move his arms. He didn’t move anything. His body was too heavy to move. But he did it anyway.

He stretched his arms until he felt the ache in his shoulders begin to dissipate with a satisfying inner pop, and then he got up. His eyes were barely open, and he knew it.

“Mr. Steel! You’re awake,” Rita said, turning the monitor off with an abrupt static-filled buzz.

“Wasn’t asleep,” Juno said. He let her think he was lying to her. He did it often enough.

“I hope you had a nice nap, boss.” She took a mug in her hand and reached her arm towards him without getting out of the chair, half-atop her desk with the effort of staying seated. Juno took the mug in both hands, and Rita, relieved of her burden, collapsed back into her usual position with such force that Juno had to stick out a foot and grab the chair back to keep her from tipping backwards, spilling the coffee she handed him from his thumb to his sleeve in the process.

At least it was lukewarm. He didn’t even feel it. 

“I didn’t nap,” he said, and took an experimental sip. It didn’t taste like anything, which was expected. It was hot against the inside of his mouth, which wasn’t. He held the sides of the mug in his hand and felt nothing.

He took another sip. Still hot.

He took the rest of the mug in gulps, and waited for the caffeine to wake him enough that he could think this through. 

“Whatever you say,” Rita half-sung, and Juno scowled. She could think what she wanted. 

It was probably better that way.


End file.
